They say one sign of maturity is the ability to adapt. Although still a young band, Massachusetts quintet Crooked Still shows marked signs of maturity on their third album, "Still Crooked," on Signature Sounds.

After a successful tour supporting their 2006 release "Shaken By A Low Sound," founding member and banjo player Greg Liszt was recruited to tour with Bruce Springsteen's Seeger Sessions band, a tour that took Liszt around the world and away from the band he helped establish. But it was only a brief absence of two month, and the band recruited the capable fingers of Noam Pikelny, now a member of Chris Thile's Punch Brothers.

Liszt looks it as a beneficial absence. "It didn't just affect my playing. It affected my whole mode of existence," Liszt says during a recent phone conversation as the band made their way from Greensboro to Charlotte, N.C.. "The way it affected my playing is it caused me to simplify things quite a bit and look at the big picture. It's good to work with a guy who is super creative and accomplished, but also really keeps his eye on the big picture at all times. It was good for my general musicianship."

"I've sort of adopted as much as I can. Rock and roll musicality is based on riffs and good songs and nice grooves. Those are the things that are high on my priority list ever since doing that tour."

Not long after the Springsteen tour ended and Liszt rejoined Crooked Still on the road founding member and cellist Rushad Eggleston announced his intention to leave the band. "It wasn't a huge surprise," Liszt says. "That guy played in the folk world for so long and played so many folk shows and had such a huge impact on the whole scene that it kind of made sense to me that he would want to go off and play crazy rock music for a while and just sort of recede from the scene for a little bit.

"He's an envelope pusher, and he is also a very restless personality, which are two things that lead him to develop that cello style, and they are also the same two things that would lead him to move to Los Angles with his actress/model girlfriend and dress up and play crazy rock music on the cello."

Eggleston now plays the California region with his group Tornado Rider performing with a drummer and occasional guitarist melding his cello to riff-based rock 'n' roll songs with a fantasy theme.

With his departure, the group was now faced with the decision to either continue on or call it quits, and the decision was made to carry on with the foundation they had built, letting the group evolve as organically as it could. "When you lose a member of a group it, of course, changes the dynamic of the band," lead singer Aoife O'Donovan says. "Rushad was one of the original members, but we decided to move forward and see what happened."

Liszt echoes O'Donovan's thoughts: "It's been great the way the band has evolved since Rushad left because you never really know what it's going to be like going forward. You just decide that you want to keep going, and you just pick the two best possible people, but you never really know what it's going to be like. And it's really been great. I mean it's been unbelievable. The band is recognizably still Crooked Still, but it has more of an ensemble feel to it now. It's nice. People are responding to it very well, which is good. We like it a lot and it is always good to see other people feeling the same way about it."

As Liszt, O'Donovan and bass player Corey DiMario looked out for the two best possible people, the choice was immediately clear to them. "They were the list," O'Donovan says with a laugh.

"Both of them were kind of known on the scene. It's not like we discovered them or anything," Liszt notes. "They've been out there doing all kinds of stuff. They're pretty well known among the musicians of our generation."

Indeed.

Fiddler Brittany Haas, who played on one track of the band's debut album, "Hop High," met the band through Eggleston, who she played with briefly in Darol Anger's Republic of Strings. She is a student at Princeton.

"The first time I met Brittany we were in the studio recording the first Crooked Still album," remembers Liszt. "She was in town visiting Harvard...She came in to visit and sit in on a couple of tunes. I remember when I first saw her play Angelina The Baker, and she totally just killed it. It was surreal to watch it, I couldn't even believe it."

The second new member was also known to the group from crossing paths on the touring circuit. Tristan Clarridge, who also played in Anger's Republic of Strings, is a four-time Grand National Fiddle Champion and the youngest person to ever win the title. "The first time I met Tristan was at a bluegrass festival in California, I believe. He had this crazy double cello jam with our old cello player in the middle of the night, which, again, kind of just blew me away," Liszt says.

Now that the new group was assembled, the band got together for a weeklong retreat to begin work on their new release. "We especially had to do it this time because we were a brand new band coming into the recording studio," Liszt says. "We'd never played a show all together as the five of us, so we really needed to spend some quality time and come up with some kind of rapport, which took all of about five minutes."

Joining the group in the studio was producer Eric Merrill, himself a heralded old-time musician noted for his unique blending of Celtic and Appalachian styles. Not only did Merrill bring his unique perspective to the music, he also brought songs to the band.

"Our producer this time was a musical peer and a really good friend of ours," Liszt says. "He also plays fiddle really well and can also make violins and violas really well. Multi-talented individual. He's got a really deep appreciation for old time music and has a real deep knowledge of old time material. He helped us find a lot of the songs; most of them actually. He helped us find those from the archives."

On their previous two albums, Crooked Still presented several well-known traditional songs from "Hop High's" Darling Corey and Rank Stranger to "Shaken By A Low Sounds'" Can't You Hear Me Callin' and Ain't No Grave. For "Still Crooked," the group wanted to delve deeper into the history and tradition of old time music.

The album's opening track, the Ola Belle Reed song Undone By Sorrow, serves to set the tone for the recording in a number of ways. The songs represent the material heard throughout the album, while being new to many and often overlooked by other musicians. The second way is by prominently featuring beautiful solo sections for both Hass' fiddle and Clarridge's cello. But although it serves this purpose, it wasn't necessarily intentional.

"That aspect of the sequencing was incidental; it just seemed to work out," Liszt says. "Sometimes it's just obvious what the first few songs need to be for a whole bunch of different reasons. We pick them mainly just for the musical flow of it, but they also happen to have these shining cello and fiddle moments, which is nice and were a really good way to introduce the new band members to the people picking up the CD for the first time. The sequencing of it was the result of several different reasons, primarily just musical, but also an attempt to introduce the new members as soon as possible."

Several of the songs come from field recordings that consist of little more than a voice with guitar accompaniment, or less. "It leaves a lot of room for creativity," says Liszt whose unique four-finger banjo playing style is as much a signature as the bands cello. "It's good because they anchor you to some point in the tradition, but they don't restrict your movement too much. Some of these were just a lone voice with no harmony, and that's where the fun starts. You get to come at it from a wide-open field."

"We usually start with some sort of general conceptual approach, like, we're going to play this song at a certain energy level with a certain feel or we're going to try to put people into a trance with it, you know, just some kind of idea. Then from there we just try to come up with our parts and layer them together and have fun playing the song a few times trying to come up with different things trying to perfect it."

The band will be perfecting their songs through extensive touring that includes individual show dates as well as a wide range of festivals from Celtic festivals to traditional bluegrass festivals.

"We find a nice little niche for ourselves in every different kind of festival that we play," Liszt says. "At the traditional bluegrass festivals like Grass Valley in California or ROMP in Owensboro, Ky., we're sort of the outside, even slightly edgy, of the bands that they have on the roster, which is good because we're actually not that outside, and we're actually not that edgy. Our music is actually pretty accessible to people, at least we try as hard as we can to make it accessible to people and people usually pay us back by accessing it."

It is accessibility that Liszt likes most about the folk music scene the band calls home. "I'm always saying that the best part of being in folk music is that there are no real boundaries between people," he says. "There's no barrier between the people who listen to the music and the people that play it and there's no real barrier between the people playing the same kind of music, so we can hang out with David Grisman. And we can also hang out with people who just show up to our concerts, and that's pretty great. If you're in the business for the socialization and the hanging out part, like I am, excellent genre to be in."